Eliminate Redundant Drug Therapies to Improve Patient Safety
Your healthcare information system can detect and prevent duplicate drug therapies, thus reducing the risk of additive clinical effects and improving patient safety. And by eliminating redundant therapies, you can also reduce medication-therapy costs.
Multiple Duplicate Therapy Screening Techniques
Using First DataBank's Duplicate Therapy Module for point-of-care screening, you can identify potential duplications by comparing new medication orders to drugs that already exist in your patient's profile. The module accomplishes this by comparing the ingredients of a newly added drug to the active ingredients of drugs in your patient's profile, and then checking the new drug against a specialized Duplicate Therapy Class. If either method detects a conflict, a warning message may be generated, depending on threshold settings.
Tailored Therapy Class Settings
The Duplicate Therapy Module includes over 400 Duplicate Therapy Classes, with links from a drug product to appropriate classes. Products may be assigned to multiple classes. This enables detection of drugs that are frequently prescribed for multiple therapeutic classes, yet act by similar mechanisms or belong to similar pharmacologic classes.
For example, diazepam is prescribed as an anti-anxiety agent, a sedative, an anti-convulsant and a skeletal muscle relaxant. Thus in the Duplicate Therapy Module, it would be assigned to multiple classes. If you were checking for duplicate therapies based on a conventional therapeutic classification system alone, you could miss duplication problems that involve multiple therapeutic classes. The unique design of this module enables it to be used in detecting this type of duplication.
Multiple Threshold Settings
In the Duplicate Therapy Module, each Duplicate Therapy Class can be assigned a
duplication allowance. This value specifies the maximum number of duplicate-therapy matches that can occur within a Duplicate Therapy Class without generating a warning. Thus if the duplication allowance were set to zero, and one or more newly prescribed drugs were detected in a given Duplicate Therapy Class, a match would occur, and a warning generated.